The Chinese App That Puts Instagram to Shame
I write to you’re from Dali, a city in China’s Yunnan province nicknamed “Dalifornia” due to its reputation as a haven for burned-out tech workers, artists, and drifters looking to disappear for a while.
I couldn’t be further from the spectacle unfolding in Beijing, where US President Donald Trump was making his first state visit to China since 2017. Here, my driver DiDi softly sings old karaoke ballads as we pass rice fields and mist-shrouded mountains. Dali is not the version of China that most foreign visitors imagine when they think of megacities filled with gleaming skyscrapers, high-speed trains and hyper-efficient delivery networks.
Over the past decade, Dali has become a magnet for a certain type of young Chinese urban dweller exhausted by the pressure cookers of cities like Beijing and Shanghai, where competition for good jobs is fierce and property prices remain staggeringly high despite the country’s recent real estate downturn. The ancient city is now dotted with vintage stores, trendy cafes, ceramic workshops, tattoo parlors and DIY art spaces, all aesthetic markers of a globally recognizable “cool neighborhood”.
The city’s atmosphere is shaped by the surrounding geography. Dali sits about 6,500 feet above sea level, between the Cangshan Mountains and picturesque Erhai Lake, and the southwest mountain town seems designed for lounging in cafes and browsing the trinkets in art markets. If you’ve never had Yunnan food, I can’t recommend it enough. Because the province borders Southeast Asia, many dishes carry notes of Thai, Burmese or Laotian influences while still tasting unmistakably Chinese.
This province is also famous for its wild mushrooms – you may remember when US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen accidentally sparked a Yunnan magic mushroom craze after eating them during an official visit to Beijing in 2023. But my favorite local specialty is actually cheese. Yunnan is one of the few places in China with a long tradition of dairy production, and locals grill slices of salty rushan cheese that taste similar to halloumi.
But I’m not writing today about exhausted technicians or Yunnan cuisine. Instead, Dali perfectly illustrates something I’ve become increasingly convinced of over the course of this trip: tourism in China now works fundamentally differently than it does in much of the West, and the Xiaohongshu app, or RedNote as it’s known outside of China, is a big reason why.
Last weekend, I found myself wandering a remote tea plantation in Ya’an, a village in Sichuan province. I was with my friend Yaling Jiang, who writes the excellent newsletter Follow the Yuan. We were looking for the “Fingerprints of the Earth,” a picturesque region where tea fields wrap around hilltops in giant concentric rings that look like huge, lush green footprints embedded in the ground.
None of us knew this corner of Sichuan. In fact, it was my first time in the province. Yet somehow we found ourselves in this dark place almost entirely alone. We got there thanks to Xiaohongshu.
US analysts often describe Xiaohongshu as “China’s Instagram”, but this comparison greatly underestimates the platform’s capabilities. Yes, people post aesthetic photos and aspirational lifestyle content. But the app also functions as a powerful discovery engine layered with comprehensive mapping functionality.
In Xiaohongshu, users can directly search for restaurants, cafes, stores, parks, monuments or entire neighborhoods. The app’s built-in map lets you browse posts geographically, meaning you can instantly see the places near you that people are talking about and posting about. Then you can get step-by-step directions to the place that seems most intriguing to you, all within the app. You can also see exactly how far a restaurant or store is from your current location.
